Category: Assignments

Rating: ☆☆☆☆

Have you ever wanted to travel, but don’t have the money? Well what if you miraculously did? Where would you go? Who would you see? The Where Do You Want To Go assignment involves making a video of the top place(s) you would love to travel to. Personally, I have always wanted to go to the Czech Republic and Romania. When I was in the fifth grade my class was divded into groups. Each group was assigned different countries and with those countries we were required to research their traditions and customs. My group had the Czech Republic and Romania, and ever since then I have always wanted to go!

I chose this assignment because I love looking at pictures of the Czech Republic and Romania. It’s mesmerizing to me! I also wanted to refresh my memory of the material I learned when I was younger. The Romanian section of my video included, Bucharest (capital of Romania, the Tunnel of Love, and Bran Castle (aka Dracula’s Castle). The video I included displays the Romanian landscape (for the full/original video click here). During the images and video the Romanian National Anthem was being played. The Czech Republic section of my video includes, Prague Castle, the little town of Karlovy Vary, and Moravian Kart. I also included a video that displays an aerial view of Prague (for the full/original video click here). While all these images are playing the music you were listening to was the Czech Republic’s National Anthem.

All these different places peaked my interest, whether it was because of it’s beauty or it’s history. I also felt that I needed to see some touristy things. If you want to go on the same virtual journey and plan your own trip follow the procedure below (I apologize in advance for the quality of my procedure photos).

Procedure

Step 1: Go to the Home tab and select the Title icon.

Step 2: Change the background to white and the font color to blue.

Step 3: Remain on the Home tab and select the Credits icon.

Step 4: Once you’ve customized your credits slide, begin to add your images and videos. You can do this by selecting the Add videos and Photos icon.

Step 5: Insert your desired video. Go to the Edit tab and select the Split tool. This will break your video apart into two segments. Next, I deleted the portion of the video I did not want by simply hitting the delete button on my keyboard.

Step 6: Once you have edited your video, go back to the Home tab and select the Add Music icon. Add your music.

Rating: ☆☆☆☆

When I was younger, my family and I would go to El Salvador every summer. While there, my parents would put my siblings and I in art classes. These art classes had kids of all different ages and each week we would have a new project. These projects ranged from painting to ceramics. I remember for one of the classes the teacher made us throw paint onto our canvas, followed by folding the canvas in half. For this video assignment I recreated the lesson they taught us by simply laying paint down and folding my canvas. It doesn’t really sound like art, but I like the plethora of combinations you can create!

I chose this assignment for three reasons. The first reason is because I thought it would be an interesting assignment to complete especially since it had to be speeded up. The second reason is because I’ve never used my phone’s camera recorder, so I wanted to give it a try. And the third reason is because I was in the mood to paint and get my hands dirty, so I thought what better way to do that than this project! Little did I know that this assignment was going to be a lot tougher.

I have used Windows Live Movie Maker previously, but my new computer did not have the program so I had to redownload it. Well it turned out, after I had finished creating my assignment that I couldn’t convert it to a .WMV file because I only had the tutorial version. After many failed solutions I had to recreate my assignment with my sister’s computer, which wasn’t too bad but I was not much of a happy camper. The second time I did the assignment I had trouble limiting to six seconds because if i hyperlapsed it too much, it would skip sections, and I didn’t want that. There were two tutorials that assisted me through my struggles. The first one helped me with fast fowarding the video and the second one helped me save the video to a .WMV file.

If you would like to try this assignment follow the procedure below.

Procedure

Step 1: Open Windows Movie Maker, select the File tab, and click on Open Project. Import your recorded video first!

Step 2: Once you import your video, highlight it. A video editing tool should appear, select the speed option. Since this assignment requires you to speed up your video I recommend doing the 8x option.

Step 3: Go to the Home tab and select the Title option.

Step 4: Once you have a title name you can adjust the font and background color.

Step 5: To add music to your video, go to the Home tab and select the Add Music icon.

Step 6: Highlight your video to receive the Music Tools tab. Under this tab you will find the Music Volume, lower it a tad.

Step 7: When you are satisfied with your video, go to the File tab and select Save Project.

Rating: ☆☆

Who doesn’t love a good joke combined with an onomatopeia? I know I do! And if you do too then you’ll absolutely love doing this assignment! This project involves finding a joke, riddle, etc. and pairing that joke with sounds to fill the background. The hardest part was finding the perfect joke. I spend an hour or so trying to find the best one! Unfortunately, when I would find a really good one there weren’t any sounds that went well with it, so the search continued. I ‘fig’ured it out in the end by finally finding one that I liked! I hope that you all can enjoy it just as much as I do!

I hope you all enjoyed my joke! If you didn’t, maybe if you listen to my reasoning behind picking it you’ll enjoy it a little more. My top three reasons I selected this particular joke are as follows… First, I have never heard that joke before, so I thought it would be refreshing compared to more commonly known ones. Second, compared to other jokes that I liked it flowed better with the sounds that I chose to form my onomatopoeias. And my last reasoning is that I found it genuinely funny and wanted to share it with you all!

I selected this assignment for a couple reasons. First off, I love onomatopoeias! I think they form a good relationship between the storyteller and the listener because it allows them to ‘coimagine’ the story together. This website provides excellent examples of onomatopoeias! The second reason I chose this assignment was because not a lot of people have done this assignment, according to the assignment bank. If you want to do an easier assignment I would recommend this one! The instructions are located below. Good luck!

Procedure

Part 1: Audacity

Step 1: Open Audacity and select the microphone. When you do this a drop down menu should appear, select the ‘start monitoring’ option.

Step 2: Once you select this the microphone will turn on. To start recording press the record button and begin recording your joke.

Step 3: Once you record your joke set it aside and import your other audio files that you downloaded from FreeSound. These audio files included the following: knocking, crowd laugh, doorbell, and playful music. To import these files go to the File tab, scroll down to import, and select the audio subcatergory.

Step 4: Once you insert all of your files you will need to do some editing. Let’s start with the voice recording you did. We are going to split the voice recording into two files. Highlight the section of the audio you want to make into another slide. Once you select he portion of audio click the scissor icon.

Step 5: Now paste the audio you just cut into a new slide. It should look like the screenshot below.

Step 6: Next is organization. We want to organize the audio files so that they don’t overlap each other. Except for the background sounds. Select the ‘Time Shift’ tool to move the audios into place.

Step 7: When you organize all of your audio files work on the background music. For the background music you don’t want it to be louder than your own voice. To decrease the sound of the music go to the far lefthand side of the screen (circled below in pink). The next thing you’ll want to do is make sure the music fades out, so that it doesn’t end abruptly. Highlight the portion of the audio you want to apply the effect to, go to the Effects tab, and scroll down to Fade Out.

Step 8: You’re almost there! To save your work go to the file tab and select the ‘export audio’ option

Part 2: SoundCloud

Step 9: Go to SoundCloud, sign in, and select the upload option. Select the ‘choose a file to upload’ option. Once you select your file your screen should look like the second screenshot below. Hit save!

Rating: ☆☆☆☆

Has anyone ever asked you, “if you could be born in any other decade what would it be?” When I get asked this question I always say the 80’s. I love the clothes they wore at the time, the movies they made, and the music that was written (for examples of each click the links). For this particular reason I decided that for this assignment I would do an 80’s mashup. This assignment involves taking songs that are similar and creating a conversation with them. See if you can discover what the conversation is about in my mashup below!

For copyright purposes I wasn’t able to post the following mashup to SoundCloud.

To break the audio down further, the conversation commences with the boy telling the girl that he’s Never Gonna Give You (her) Up, which she replies to with Every Rose Has It’s (his) Thorn. I incorporated this song because I wanted to send the message that the girl finds a lot of flaws in their relationship, but the guy replies with Time After Time. The clip I used from that song is supposed to display the guy’s commitment to the girl. However, she is not convinced so she replies with I Ran (So Far Away). After failed attempts into trying to convince his partner, the guy’s mood changes with Tainted Love. I wanted to end the conversation with a powerful song, so I chose Love Is A Battlefield. This last song is said by the girl to the guy letting him know that relationships come and go, but in the end it’ll be alright.

In order to do this assignment all you need is Audacity. If you do not have the program you can download it here. In the section below you will discover how I created my mash up by following the step-by-step procedure. Good Luck!

Procedure

Step 1: Open Audacity and go to the file tab. Select the import option and click the audio subcatergory. Upload your first song. In this instance it would be Never Gonna Give You Up by Rick Astely.

Step 2: Next, highlight the beginning of the song that you want and select the trim audio tool (where the mouse is located on the screenshot)

Step 3: Repeat step 1. The next song that should be uploaded is Every Rose Has It’s Thorn by Poison.

Step 4: Once your second song is uploaded repeat step 2.

Step 5: After you’ve selected the section of the song you want you are going to move the audio of the second song, so that it plays directly after the first. This can be done by selecting the time shift tool (shown in the second screenshot)

Step 6: Keep repeating steps 3-5 for each song. The list order for the songs should be as follows:

Never Gonna Give You Up

Every Rose Has It’s Thorn

Time After Time

I Ran (So Far Away)

Tainted Love

Love Is A Battlefield

Step 7: For Love is a Battlefield (or for your last song) you want to make sure that it ends smoothly, if you didn’t pick the ending of the song to be your final audio clip. What you want to do is highlight the last snippet of the audio (shown in screenshot below), go to the effects tab, scroll down and click on fade out.

Step 8: Go to the file tab and select the export audio option.

Step 9: When saving your new song double check that you save it as an MP3 file. If you do not have the option to save as an MP3 go to this website and download the plug-in for Audacity.

Rating: ☆☆☆☆

Stand By Me is a classic song by Ben E. King. But what happens when you mix the original with it’s cover? Well that’s what I had to discover for this assignment. I took Ben E. King’s classic and combined it with Florence + the Machine’s cover version. I chose to do this combination because I wanted to pick a song that was relatively well known. Furthermore, I think it’s rare to find a cover version of a song that is just as good as the original.

For copyright purposes I wasn’t able to post the following song rendition to SoundCloud.

I decided to do this specific assignment because I was curious to see how these two songs would flow together. In the beginning they sounded relatively good, until they became out of sync (around 0:19). I think this rendition had an indie soulful vibe to it. I think the emotion for this combination slightly intensifies. The reasoning being, that the song itself delivers a powerful message, but the way they are both sung gives it the additional ‘oomph’. Creating this rendition only involved using the program Audacity. The procedure is listed below if you would like to recreate this assignment.

Procedure

Step 1: Open Audacity and go to the file tab. Select the import option and click the audio subcatergory. Upload both the original song and its cover in step 1

Step 2: The first audio file should be Stand By Me by Ben King and the second one should be the version by Florence + the Machines. Select the Florence version and highlight the audio frequency, then select the trim audio tool. This will get rid of the end of the song, the fade (seen in the second screenshot below).

Step 3: Move the Florence audio over by using the move tool next to the Record button. Move the audio to where the first big peak of Ben’s song is, so that the beginning of both songs sync up.

Step 4: Go to the file tab and select the export audio option.

Step 5: When saving your new song double check that you save it as an MP3 file. If you do not have the option to save as an MP3 go to this website and download the plug-in for Audacity.

Rating: ☆☆☆ ½

How many of us have walked into a pet store and are saddened by the lack of dogs there? My audio story is based on an owner who goes to pick up her puppy from the pet store groomer. However, when she walks into the pet store she doesn’t immediately pick up her dog. She walks in, browses the fish, and the dog toys until it’s time to pick up her puppy.

The reason I picked this topic for my project is because my family is thinking about getting their first dog and I thought it would be an interesting approach. However, I couldn’t get all the sounds I wanted. Most of the audio files came from the FreeSound website. The five sounds I used were, the entrance bell, high heels, fish tank noise, squeaky dog toys, and the dog barks.

If you wanted to do this assignment and need assistance, the instructions are posted below.

Part 1: FreeSound

Step 1: Go to this website and download the following sounds. I posted the screenshots to each of the sounds I used in my audio except for the dogs. In order to get the dogs type in the search bar, “dogs barking” and it will be your first result.

Part 2: Audacity

Step 2: Go to File, Import, and select the Audio subcatergory. Import your first audio file. You will be uploading your files SEPARATELY

Step 3: Once you open your first file, select the trim tool. I’ve circled it in red in the screenshot below. After you select this tool highlight the section of the audio that you DO want to use.

Step 5: Now that you have a previous audio file (file 1) you don’t want to overlap the sound. Select the Time Shift tool (circled in red on the screenshot below) and slide/move your audio to where it doesn’t interfer with the first audio file

Step 6: Repeat steps 2-5 for the remaining audio files, so for this specific example it would be for the last three.

Step 7: Once you’ve trimmed your audio and you’ve aligned them it is now time to save your work. Go to File and select Export Audio.

Step 8: When you complete step 7 you should have the option of exporting your audio file as an MP3 file. If you do not, you need to download the plug-in, Lame. Once you download the plug-in, you will see the option to download as an MP3 file. Click the save button!

Part 3: SoundCloud

Step 9: Go to your SoundCloud and log in. Select the upload button on the upper right hand side of the webpage

Design Blitz Reflection

At the beginning of this week, when I first saw this assignment I was worried. It seemed like a lot of work because of the background information. But like Tim Gunn says, “designers make it work,” and that’s exactly what I did. For this assignment the four concepts I chose to expand on were color, typography, balance, and proportion.

What is color? Most of us experience it in our everyday lives, but never go beyond that. For this assignment I learned a little bit about color theory and what colors compliment each other. The main source that I used for this section was an article by Steven Bradley. This article discusses the meaning of color, types of colors, color schemes, etc. I decided to demonstrate this concept by using the picture below. I thought that the picture I took is effective because it demonstrates the basics by displaying the primary and secondary colors, without it being overwhelmingly unappealing to the eye.

Out of all the concepts, I learned the most about typography. I thought the terimonology was interesting, especially the video that displayed which fonts to never use because I’ve definitely used some of them before. My image for this portion displays the terms used in the article, The Basics of Typography. I mainly wanted to focus on tracking, kerning, and alignment. Judging from the picture below the tracking in the words is higher than normal. Kerning is a bit more normal because the distance between one subject and another is relatively the same. This picture serves as an ineffective example for alignment and that is one of the main reasons I took it. As you can see below there is no alignment because the words are all over the place.

Balance was the trickiest concept for me to capture. I think the main reason being that I was overthinking it. I learned about balance through this website. Most of us know that there are two types of symmetry, assymetrical and symmetrical. In my example it’s a lttle difficult to tell, but it is symmetrical. If I were to split the dining table through the middle they would be the same on both sides. Another photo I took, but didn’t include in my previous blog post is my assymetrical photo. The second photo below displays this. The plant is not completely symmetrical because one of the smaller stumps has leaves the other doesn’t. This method is effective because it makes the image pleasing to the eye by having an equal amount of subjects/things in its surroundings.

The last method I chose was proportions. Proportions is one of my favorite methods that can be incorporated in photography! According to my source, there are two types of proportions. The first one is when an object is compared to a different object, and the second one is when one subject is compared to itself. In my example, I demonstrate the second type of proportion because you have a big succulent plant and then a smaller on. This was my favorite photo that I took during this assignment because it’s aesthetically pleasing. I think it’s an effective method to use in photography because the bigger element has the limelight, while the secondary object supports it.

Design Blitz Findings

For this week’s workload I decided to do this assignment last to allow myself more time to ponder what concepts I wanted to use and where I wanted to take my pictures. The concepts I chose were color, typography, balance, and proportion. For the color concept I decided to use my living room pillow because it had many colors and it wasn’t overwhelming, so I thought it was interesting. Typography involved a little more creativity. I could’ve taken a picture of an excerpt, but I wanted the image to be more interesting. The picture I took for this concept was definitely my least favorite, but I like that I used the text on my pillow case as my example. The balance concept was tricky as well, but I decided to take a picture of my dining room table because it has a very unique look to it. It also happened to be symmetrical, so it worked out in my favor. For the last concept I captured an image of one of my mom’s succulents and it turned out to be my favorite picture. Below is a compilation of these photos.

Google. The most popular search engine in the world. The question is, what do people Google on everyday basis? For this assignment I had to type in the phrase, “I hate…” followed by a letter of the alphabet. Some of the results were very strange. For example, in the GIF below if you look carefully for the letter ‘W’ one of the suggestions was, “I hate when I’m studying and a velociraptor…” I chose to do this assignment because as much as GIMP and I don’t get along, I wanted to give it another try. It ended up going better than expected. You could say GIMP and I have a love hate relationship. I also chose this assignment because I was interested in discovering what the results would be after the phrase was inputted.

This time around using GIMP wasn’t as awful as my previous experiences. GIMP was easier to use because for this assignment I was required to use images, rather than a video. Below is the step-by-step process I used to create my GIF.

Instructions

**PSA this assignment involves a lot of screenshots. In order to not get confused when uploading rename them and put them in chronological order**

Step 1: Go to ‘File’ and click open to upload your FIRST image

Step 2: For your SECOND+ image(s) go to ‘File’ and click ‘Open as Layers’. Once you do this you will see all the pictures appear on the right hand side bar

Step 3: Once I uploaded my photos from letters A-Z I watched my GIF. In order to do this go to the ‘Filters’ tab. Once under ‘Filters’, go to ‘Animation’, then select ‘Playback’

Step 4: Once you select ‘Animation’ your screen should look like the picture below. Hit the ‘Play’ button to observe your GIF.

Step 5: Next go to ‘File’ and select ‘Export as…’

Step 6: Name your document. At the END of the document name make sure that you put the extension .gif This is shown in the image below. Then click the ‘Export’ button.

Step 7: Once you click ‘Export’ a pop up box should come up like the one below. Make sure that the ‘As animation’ box is checked off.

**Another note–you might need to edit the delay between frames because the GIF might be too fast or too slow. I set mine at 650 milliseconds**

For our first GIF assignment I decided to base it off one of my favorite musicians, Chance the Rapper. The video I used is from the music video, May I Have This Dance by Francis and the Lights featuring Chance. I chose this video because most of Francis and the Lights music videos are very minimalistic, which I enjoy. This clip was a little different because Chance gives the video a more playful vibe, while keeping the minimalism of the other band.

At first I chose this assignment because I wanted my first GIF to be somewhat easy. I was wrong. Finding the clip and the specific part I wanted to use wasn’t a problem, it was creating it. Towards the beginning I had decided I was going to give GIMP another try, but all the tutorials I watched were instructions on how to convert images not videos. So I decided to use a different method. Below you can find instructions on how I made my GIF.

Direction 1: To begin, go to this website and enter your video URL, in my case it was May I Have This Dance by Francis and the Lights featuring Chance the Rapper.

Direction 2: Once you upload your URL your video should appear. Pay attention to the start time and the GIF length settings below.

Direction 3: Adjust the start time setting to 2:14 and the GIF length to 7 seconds

Before adjusting the settings

After adjusting the settings

Direction 4: Hit the ‘Create a GIF’ button and then select the download button. Located in the bottom left hand corner.